


Half of the Moon

by liquidCitrus



Category: Eclipse Phase, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-30 15:41:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17831408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: Madoka Kaname was Homura Akemi's roommate in college. But only one of them survived the destruction of the planet Earth. Homura devotes herself to fighting the AIs that had precipitated the destruction of the Earth, and grows proficient, and deeply scarred. She distinguishes herself as a member of Firewall, a conspiracy devoted to preventing another apocalypse.But then it turns out that Madoka may not be as dead as Homura thought she was...Likely permanently incomplete.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> While this is set in the Eclipse Phase universe, this work does not require knowledge of the Eclipse Phase universe to read. I also play fast and loose with several details of the EP setting - most notably geography. (Also, while Kyubey shows up, he is not evil, at least not in the way he is in Madoka Magica. The truth is weirder.)
> 
> Tags will be updated at the relevant chapter.
> 
> While this story does not contain any Rebellion spoilers, it contains Rebellion-influenced characterization, most notably of Homura Akemi. The fanfiction To the Stars is also an influence, especially on the characterization of Mami Tomoe, although that setting's transhumanist magical girls aren't as traumatized.

"Identify yourself."

"H-H-H-Homura A-Akemi."

"How did you get here?"

"I, ah, I - I rented a motorcycle. From the school, you know, they evacuated us to the Mars campus so that we could - you know, keep studying - but I couldn't - couldn't just - "

Mami Tomoe observed the trembling girl in front of her. "Did you know that this place is crawling with the remnants of the TITANs. The very same machines that destroyed the Earth."

Homura nodded, the ends of her braids flapping in the partially terraformed Martian wind.

"So why are you in here?"

"My - my friend - my only friend - she didn't evacuate in time, she d-d-died - " and here the girl took off her sunglasses and scrubbed the tears off her face with the back of her hand - "and she told me to - to - to destroy what killed her..."

"I see." Mami shifted her gaze to the pile of mismatched guns she'd found strewn across the ground like breadcrumbs, leading to where Homura was. "Did you know how to use those guns?"

"I - I watched an instructional video on the mesh, it showed me what to do, but - but - I didn't know which one was best, so I, I just fabbed all of them."

"Let's get you out of the area so they can finish establishing the cordon," said Mami, slowly, "and then I'll see what I can do."

"Are you with the Rangers?"

"No."

"Then who are you?"

Mami Tomoe did not tell the whole truth. Or even most of it. She did tell the important part, though. "I'm sworn to destroy the TITANS, too."

☆

Homura had just finished another day of work. Another boring day, staring down a corridor that never had anyone in it.

Mami had gotten her a contract with Direct Action, which sent her through accelerated simulspace training in weapons and tactics and then hired her out for guard duty. It paid fairly well - especially considering her lack of experience - but since she hadn't been in any of the militaries before the Fall, she was usually stuck on the dullest of assignments - sitting as a security guard, in the flesh, in front of some unimportant hypercorp installation or other.

Homulilly, her Muse - her AI companion - buzzed her. {Priority message from Mami Tomoe.}

Mami needed help nearby, and desperately. She didn't say what she needed help with, but given the circumstances when they'd met, Homura could hazard a rather good guess.

{Send an excuse to my manager for tomorrow,} Homura thought back at Homulilly. {And tell Mami I'm heading over.}

Mami's message pointed her towards a warehouse on the outskirts of Neo-Mitakihara. The warehouse was unremarkable, but contained a dead drop - a second set of coordinates, and a gun. And a message.

[Don't hold back. We'll pay for a resleeving if things go wrong.]

This was both reassuring and foreboding, Homura thought. She wasn't risking permanent death, but on the other hand, the idea that even temporary death was a serious enough concern to be worth mentioning did not exactly inspire confidence. And who was "we"?

She climbed back onto her motorcycle and kicked off into the Martian wilds.

☆

"Congratulations," Mami began, "on the successful neutralization."

The ragged remnants of her Sentinel team, scattered around in a hotel room, grumbled. Successful sounded too optimistic, for an op in which three of them had been killed. They'd been caught in the blast of the bomb they'd used. Homura had retrieved their soul gems - continuously-updated brain backups, encased in nanoassembled diamond and nestled next to the brainstem - which was why they could even be debriefed at all. The fourth one had escaped to call for help, and Mami had sent Homura in.

Luckily, there wasn't much to kill; the bomb had pretty much taken care of it.

"Good thing none of us got turned, huh?" commented Nakazawa, one of the revived ones.

"Turned?" asked Homura.

"Oh, right, you have no idea, you just joined Firewall. Well, some of the TITAN nanoswarms are screwed up. They invade you and turn you into a zombie. Here, I'll send you some pictures."

Homura opened the pictures in her meshmail, and blanched. "And we  _fight_  them?"

"We fight to save transhumanity," said Mami, calmly. "It may have been a year since the TITANs seemed to lose interest in us, but we can't afford to let our guard down in case they decide to come back, and even their trash-heaps are full of things that could kill us in a snap." She sipped from her teacup. "Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?"

Homura looked Mami in the eyes. "I promised my only friend on Earth that I'd avenge her death. I'm looking forward to keeping that promise."

"Good." Mami leaned back in her chair. "I'll have to send Kyubey your information, and you'll have to go through the induction process properly. But in any case, fighting evil AIs is not without its perks. For example, Firewall pays for remote backups and resleeving..."

☆

Firewall Proxy Mami Tomoe (Neo-Mitakihara, Mars) logged request for personnel file.

Personnel file Timeless, complexity 1. Generated AF 9, December 15 15:22 extrapolated earth UTC.

Tenure length: 7 years 145 days (toggle Martian year view)  
Efficiency rating: Extremely Useful Asset, Do Not Promote  
Specializations: covert operations, marksmanship, long-term missions  
Strengths: loyal to Firewall mission, high resolve, improvises effectively under pressure, trauma tolerance, no family  
Weaknesses: obsessive personality, difficulty forming emotional bonds, self-reported close friend missing/presumed dead during Fall, internalizes failure, may become reckless/self-destructive under extreme stress  
Operations: 37 successful, 2 unsuccessful, 1 ongoing

No major changes in status forecasted (95% confidence).

☆

Candeloro, Mami's muse, popped into Mami's field of view. {Homura Akemi is in the lobby and is requesting entrance.}

{Oh?} Mami opened the video feed for the lobby and put a tea kettle on. {Let her in.}

Homura bowed at Mami's apartment's door and entered. "I'm sorry to call on such short notice."

"It's no trouble," said Mami, looking her protege up and down. How Homura had grown over the past few years - transforming from a timid student into a world-class markswoman and spy. Mami counted Homura as one of her greatest achievements. "What did you wish to discuss?"

"Homulilly let me know this morning that there was an editorial in the Olympus Times with the byline of one Madoka Kaname. I intend on taking an indefinite leave of absence to investigate this."

Mami poured both of them some tea. "You told me that Ms. Kaname had no offworld backups. It's possible she might have been smuggled from Earth."

Homura nodded, silently.

"I'll have our crows look into this. But if it looks like blockade runners are involved, it's entirely possible we could justify the use of Firewall resources to investigate, and recover the egos involved."

"You would - do that for me?" Homura's usually hard-won composure was cracking.

Mami pushed forwards the box of tissues on the coffee table. "Firewall takes care of its own. But this won't be a leave of absence. It may be another mission, or string of missions, before we know enough to retrieve her. Will you agree to that?"

"For her? Anything."

"Thank you," said Mami, defocusing her eyes to browse the Mesh on her implants. "Can you have Homulilly send me the editorial in question? I'd like to make sure I have the right one."


	2. Several years later

{What are the chances of this Madoka affair being a trap?} asked Mami, abruptly, after lunch.

{I don't know.} Candeloro leaned into her field of vision, impossible helical twintails bouncing like springs. {Kyubey says he won't give you the numbers because they wouldn't help right now, but he also said that you should risk it.}

Mami picked up the leftover food and dumped it, dishes and all, into the recycler chute. {And even if Madoka isn't a trap, she's still distracting Homura. I'm not sure I should've promised her Firewall resources.}

The muse looked off to the side for a moment, thinking. {You did well, though, in that conversation. Timeless is a very important agent and the way you managed to retain her was rather ingenious. The Eye will overlook that, I think.}

{Thank you.} It didn't assuage Mami's doubts, but it helped. {I still have a bad feeling about this.}

{You've had many bad feelings about operations that turned out fine in the end,} chided Candeloro, who tactfully wasn't mentioning the operations that didn't turn out fine in the end. {Some hunches are worth trusting, but some aren't, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them.}

{I figured you'd say that, but I still wanted to hear it from you.}

They shared a companionable silence. Candeloro had been assigned to Mami since Mami was a child, and though Candeloro was a limited non-sentient AI (unlimited AI being a bad idea for reasons that the Fall had made obvious) she was a friend. Not the same as a real transhuman, but she really didn't have time for real transhuman friends anymore, nor could she justify pulling them into the orbit of the powerful forces that swirled around her.

Finally, Mami broke the silence again. {There's nobody on the Sentinel team right now that Homura trusts. I should go with them.}

Even though she was hooked up directly to Mami's brain and had probably noticed this thought before it was fully formed, Candeloro still managed to look shocked.

☆

{Tell me again why we couldn't just egocast out there,} said Kyoko Sakura through the skinlink. {Don't we just need to meet with someone?}

To outside observers, the Sentinel team was just four tourists bumping their way through a crowded pedestrian tube burrowed through an asteroid, colliding with each other about as much as any tourist group unused to microgravity would. (One of them was faking this, but the other three were not.) Which was enough for them to network their nanites to pass messages through whenever they touched. Unjammable and nearly impossible to intercept, since there was no broadcasting involved.

{Because the best my contacts could do was put me on the next asteroid over, and the window Homura gave us is narrow enough as it is.} Mami, dressed in a fashionable skimpy smart-fabric dress that managed to improbably cling to her legs despite the acrobatics, sighed. Kyoko was a Sentinel who had recently transferred from the Kazamino Firewall cell, and though she was competent the previous group she was with noted that she took some getting used-to. Mami hoped she still had nerves left by then. {You should thank me for managing to get you a Fury morph at all. They were nearly out, for some reason.}

{Some reason, huh. I bet they just didn't want to fork any over today,} Kyoko retorted. {Just like the guy with the shuttle service. I had to apply more pressure than I wanted to. It won't uncover me, but the pants are sagging, if you catch my drift.}

{This body's too tall,} Sayaka Miki, a relatively new recruit who'd grown up in Mars orbit, complained. {And it's addicted to orbital hash. I didn't even know you  _could_  be addicted to orbital hash.}

{Hush, you,} thought Homura. {If either of you really wanted you could've burnt rep requesting something better. And Kyoko, don't encourage the new girl.}

Kyoko sent a grumbling acknowledgement.

They traveled in internal silence for a while, listening to the background chatter, as the tunnel widened and the traffic thinned out. They could've turned down the noise and piped music to their implants instead, but though they were playing tourists, they still had to keep an ear out.

Homura stopped, abruptly. {I think I hear something.}

And then there was a pop and a hiss from up ahead.

☆

The bulkhead doors sealed immediately to seal off atmosphere. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be happening in the section the team was in, but they were trapped with about thirty other people. The residents grabbed onto handholds carved into the walls and pressed themselves flat, trying to avoid being flailed at by the noobs who didn't know that there was no up in space.

"There has been a minor incident of atmosphere contamination," said the habitat AI through both audio and mesh channels. Though it usually presented as male, a female voice helped in these kinds of situations, so it had simulated a cool female voice. "It has been contained and is being taken care of. Please remain patient while we verify that your sector is safe to unseal."

Kyoko mentally sighed, over the link. {Ophelia, do you know what's going on?}

{Official mesh's being recalcitrant, as always,} said Kyoko's muse. {But we should've had an evacuation route unsealed by now at least. It doesn't take this long to verify atmosphere.}

{The Firewall agent assigned to this beehive is pulling rank to see what's going on,} added Candeloro. {No word past that, yet.}

Homura grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to the wall like the zero-g natives, then extended a bare foot to make skin contact with the other Firewall agents. {The explosion was close to us. I suspect foul play.}

{Of course you suspect foul play,} commented Kyoko. {Likely as not some kid set off a stink bomb. I don't know how these people stand being cooped up in a rock all day.}

Mami squinted. {No, I think Homura's right. Something's wrong.}

☆

Kyoko turned around to look at Mami. Or tried. The movements just sent her into a spin. Sayaka giggled out loud. "Ground-pounders. At least grab onto the wall or something."

"How am I supposed to start moving when I'm not close to one of the walls to push off of?"

"Like you just did," said Sayaka, who shoved her feet through a wall handhold and pushed herself into a standing position, then grabbed onto Kyoko and pulled, at the same time reestablishing skinlink contact. {I managed to "borrow" some of the sensors in both of the next-door compartments. Custom toxin in the air, the scrubbers weren't calibrated to it so they can't clean it effectively until they finish assembling new nanos. Nothing for us to worry about, with medichines, but it'd put the mundanes out of commission for a while.}

{Would it kill them?} asked Mami.

{Probably,} thought Sayaka, uncertainly. {They'd definitely be in a lot of pain.}

Kyoko frowned. {So, if it wouldn't affect us anyway, were they targeting us or not?}

Homura rolled over and changed what foot she was using to keep in contact with the others. {If they were, they wouldn't expect it to stop us. Likely as not they're just waiting to see if we risk the civilians, to give them an excuse to ban us from this hab.}

{Well, we need to get off this rock anyway,} said Kyoko, {so why not?}

{But the civilians - } started Sayaka.

{They'll resleeve,} said Mami. {We might even have one of our fronts divert some resources over to help. Call it a charity donation or something.}

{This is crazy! You're crazy! I thought we were supposed to be saving people!} Sayaka's mouth was opening and closing like a fish's, but she was managing not to make any sound. Barely.

Homura's eyes were cold as hard vacuum. {If you're not willing to go through with this, I will kill you and have your backup put into a locked simulspace for attempted sabotage of a Firewall mission.}

Silence on the link.

Sayaka closed her eyes. {I hope this "contact" of yours is worth it.  _Homura Akemi._ }

A moment later, the bulkhead unsealed, and the screams started.

☆

Madoka Kaname had never spent more than a few hours at a time in simulspace before. Sure, she'd gone on simulspace vacations with her family, and she'd designed a simulspace environment for art class, but those experiences didn't really let her know just how weird simulspace was if you were stuck in it for months and years.

She knew most people didn't feel that way about extended time as an upload, but the feeling of fakeness  _itched_. But they'd given her a job to do. So it could have been a lot worse. She could have died.

She didn't get much information about the outside world, only enough for her to write the ad copy and press releases, but what she did get was very strange. Half of the moon was gone? No, not gone, just inaccessible. A rival government's drones or something. And Earth... well, she'd been told that she'd been rescued from Earth. Rescued from what? From college?

In her third year of work she was promoted to writing with bylines. It was only paid editorials placed in newspapers, but to write convincing editorials she needed to know more about the outside world. The people who'd put her in indentured servitude had had to explain what had happened.

Earth was gone. It was now ten years past the apocalypse. And in all likelihood everyone she knew from school was dead.

But she could hope.

And she did.


End file.
